


we who are forever

by WerewolvesAreReal



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - They Never Sailed to Valinor, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 21:12:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13279980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WerewolvesAreReal/pseuds/WerewolvesAreReal
Summary: There is an elf who has lived in Aglarond for nigh on five hundred years before Grilka's birth. He stays always near the inner caverns and the halls of dead dwarf-lords, and the younger dwarrows know him for his songs and sad stories, his queer habit of walking the caverns in twilit sleep and speaking to the ferns that grow by the inner ponds.Grilka likes talking to the elf, despite his grief. Somehow it feels like talking to an old friend.





	we who are forever

There is an elf who has lived in Aglarond for nigh on five hundred years before Grilka's birth. He stays always near the inner caverns and the halls of dead dwarf-lords, and the younger dwarrows know him for his songs and sad stories, his queer habit of walking the caverns in twilit sleep and speaking to the ferns and lichens that grow by the inner ponds.

Grilka likes talking to the elf, despite his grief. Somehow it feels like talking to an old friend.

He meets him first on the third day after Grilka's twelfth birthday. Grilka is young by the measures of both man and dwarf, but his parents moved to the Glittering Caves recently to take up control of the halls; they are of Durin's line, through a lesser branch, and he feels this weight every day.

So it is natural that the Caves' sole elf take an interest in him - as much, it is said, as the elf is interested in anything. He calls over Grilka one day while perched atop a queerly angular jut of rock that seems to break the perfect smoothness of the cave walls. Grilka eyes this little balcony for a minute, and recalls that the elf was companion to the first lord of these halls, another dwarf of Durin's line. The overhang could fit two, lying down comfortably, and he sits below it with an odd pang in his chest.

He does not pity the elf; he does not think that this ancient creature would thank him for it.

“Greetings, Grilka, son of Glenna,” says the elf. “Will you join us today?”

“He is going to tell us the story of the Nine Walkers,” bursts an excited young dwarrow; the boy is barely two feet tall, with no trace of a beard, and he is already cross-legged on the ground like a strange supplicant. “And the Three Hunters.”

The elf smiles, but it looks false. “You were one of them,” says Grilka suddenly. “That is what they say – that you were one of the Nine who took the ring to Mordor.”

“That is what they say,” echoes the elf softly. “But it was only Frodo and Sam who went to Mordor, in the end.”

“And all but you are dead,” says Grilka.

It's a cruel thing to say; even at twelve he knows this. A few of the older dwarrows give him harsh looks. But the elf only smiles wider – as though he knows not what else to do – and says, “That is not so; Mithrandir, who you call Tharkun, will like as not outlive us all.”

“Yet he travels the world,” says Grilka, “And you are here.”

He does not know why this makes him angry. But the elf's fake smile finally falters, and Grilka is both pleased and regretful.

“Yes,” says the elf at last. “I am here.”

He tells them the story of the Silmarils, that day, and makes not one more mention of the Three Walkers.

Grilka listens to many of the elf's stories over the years. He tries his hand at archery, in his twenty-eighth year, and is surprised to find that the elf teaches lessons.

“What,” the fey thing laughs when he expresses surprise, “Did you think I spent all my days telling tales to children?”

“I have always known of the worth of your tales,” Grilka manages at last. The sight of the bow held easily in the elf's graceful hands makes his stomach twist. He feels he can imagine it lifting, rising, the elf's brow furrowed as he pulls back arrow after arrow into the dirty necks of orcs. But there are few orcs, these days. “Of your arm, I have heard nothing; perhaps it is not worth the talk?”

The elf only laughs at his impudence. “Well, come, and you may judge for yourself my worth with the bow.”

After a few weeks Grilka disdains the bow utterly for his axe, but he will admit that the elf is not _entirely_ terrible with it. “A proper, bendy weapon for a flighty creature,” he mutters once, and is scolded immediately by his weapons' master.

But the elf smiles one of his true smiles, in response, so Grilka cannot regret it.

* * *

 

When Grilka is fifty-three he is allowed to start joining some of the less-dangerous patrols that leave the Caves. They mingle often with groups of patrolling Rohirrim – often enough that Grilka can tell it is no accident, and that these voyages are meant to provide diplomatic training for the future Lord of Aglarond.

His comrade Thedin once tells a young Eorling that their tales at the fire are interesting, but they cannot compare to what the dwarves know of history. “For at our fires the story-teller has seen much of history with his own eyes,” Thedin says. “And a story gains more meaning when you know it to be true, and the speaker tells of his own victories and triumphs.”

“He must tells very brief stories,” the man says, “And speak little of the glory of old.” But when Thedin says their most frequent story-teller is an elf, the man laughs aloud.

“There are no elves,” he says, “if ever there were. The forests are empty, and elves are only rumors, like that of the little half-creature that is said to have begun this Age. Perhaps you have been tricked, friend, by a pretty Man who likes to sing in trees,” and he refuses to listen to their arguments to the contrary.

It makes Grilka angry even though he cannot be surprised. The elf does not leave Aglarond. It is hard to picture him anywhere else, even when he speaks of wandering through the ancient forest of Fangorn and living his childhood in the dark, still-bitter Mirkwood, which he lovingly names Greenwood the Great. He is half of a fairy-tale even in person, though the elf laughingly assures his listeners that fairies, too, are real.

Every dwarf in Aglarond has grown to adulthood with the tales of the elf spinning in their ears, his watchful eyes gleaming through the dark if they should rise at night for a stroll. He is as known to them as the song of their caves, the seams and fissures of the rock which is their home.

It is that day on the plains, surrounded by sleeping dwarves and Eorlingas as the fire wanes, that Grilka realizes he does not know the elf's name.

* * *

 

The elf _does_ tell the story of the Three Hunters just once in Grilka's hearing. He is sixty-seven then, almost of age and too young to sit with the infant dwarrows ringed under the elf's balcony. He goes anyway.

It is not a grand story, - not in comparison to some of the more complex tales the elf weaves around the Eldar Days of the First Age, the days that occurred before even their immortal watcher was born. These stories speak of hundreds of immortals blinking their first gazes at a starry sky, and the great pilgrimage west, and ancient cities burning.

The story of the Three Hunters is more alike to the tales told by old veterans who know what it is to hunt orcs and goblin-hordes, to wipe away the last vestiges of the Black City. The elf tells how he and two others set across the plains, on foot, to pursue two captive friends. Man, elf, and dwarf, they ran day and night unceasing. The picture makes a drum beat under Grilka's heart.

When he tells about his hasty threat to then-king Eomer, the younger dwarves laugh. Fool, he thinks, and also: _here_ is a loyal friend.

When the story is over the elf seems wont to fall into one of his strange, dreaming slumbers; he sits propped against the wall with his eyes open but unseeing. The other dwarrows take this as a signal to leave. The lanterns burn dully now in the night, and the hall slowly empties.

Grilka stays.

He sits under the balcony for an hour or more, watching the slow shift of movement through the little gathering-hall that branches out into all the main districts of Aglarond. Above him the elf sleeps, or dreams, or whatever he does when staring out at the dwarves with his blind eyes. Maybe dreaming is happier than life, Grilka thinks, for someone has who has already seen enough of the latter.

But finally he notes the elf stirring, and he asks a question as though time has never passed. As though the story has just been told.

For an elf, perhaps it is true.

“What was he like?” Grilka must ask. “The dwarf. The one they say you loved, and still love.”

Still love, because elves may only love once. One similarity between them, Grilka thinks; and what an important similarity.

The elf looks like he could still be sleeping. He tilts his head down and stares through Grilka for a moment. “No one has asked me that question in three centuries,” he says finally. “...He was strong and steadfast, like any dwarf; and stubborn, as I told him often.” A ghost of a smile flicks over the elf's face, replaced immediately by heavier sorrow. “But he was quick to laugh, too, even at the end of his days; and when he died he clasped my hands, and told me he would harass Aule himself until we could be together again.”

And for awhile Grilka thinks that the elf will say nothing more. He feels sorry for the question, and for the visible grief the elf shows; and he marvels, too, at such sorrow that has lasted through the centuries. He pictures the elf flitting through these caves after his death, after the last death of Men, and beyond the days where the world has blackened in its own waning age. The enormity of the image shakes him, and he rises without a word, unable to look this ancient creature in the face.

He sits among a group of older dwarrows – the old, retired masters who keep strange hours now as time prepares to send them to the halls of Mandos. But in this hour of darkness they too sip quietly at their beers.

And slowly, slowly, a soft song rises from the balcony. And from the elf.

The older dwarrows pretend not to listen, though Grilka sees their hands pausing over their cups, the worn fingers wiping at eyes that shine suspiciously bright. He makes no similar affectations, instead turning around to view the sight with his own eyes.

The elf sits hunched around himself, a lone spark of light in the faded night-glow of the hall lanterns. He sings a song of the honey-gold streaks which shine over the ocean, the white foam that flecks the shores of the Grey Havens and curl back to the Undying Lands. He sings the ever-green home of the Eldar. He sings _there on the joyful shores_ and _spring that never fades_ and _Isle without death,_ and Grilka wonders for a moment if the elf has regrets; if he wants to leave this place, at last, and join his own kin in a place where he will never again know the bitter pangs of mortality.

The elf sings, _On the white shores of Eressea I hear them._ And Grilka...

Grilka has never seen the sea, but he thinks he could learn to hate it.

* * *

 

When Grilka is seventy he joins his first proper patrol, and they are attacked.

There are few orcs in these days, but the ones which remain are mean and desperate. Two jump on Thedin and drag him to the ground, biting his arms and gnawing at his flesh with a raw hunger that shakes them all. And then the dwarves fight back, because there is little else to do, although Grilka knows that his old friend is already dead.

Some birthday.

There were only eight of them on the patrol, and nearly two-dozen, half-starved orcs. Grilka finds himself counting under his breath as he hacks - “One! Two! Three!”

A sudden noise behind him makes Grilka whip around. An orc stands not a foot from his back, mouth agape, cutlass raised stupidly in the air. A red-shafted arrow protrudes through his stomach, and after a moment the orc slowly sinks to the ground.

“That's five for me,” says a soft voice, and then the elf is at Grilka's side, whipping at orcs with a deadly knife.

When the fighting is done two scouts are sent away and the other dwarves retrieve Thedin's body.

Grilka turns to the elf, though, for more immediate concerns.

“Why did you come?” he asks stupidly.

The elf takes a step back from this question. He looks pained and confused. “...I...”

“It was me,” says Grilka. He knows this. “It was for me.”

“...Yes,” says the elf slowly. “...Because I could not leave you. Because my heart is broken; but if you died here, and now, I think it would shatter and never be remade.”

An odd feeling passes through Grilka. “...Just the sort of nonsense I would expect from an elf,” he says. “If you die for me, Legolas, I'll kill you myself.”

The elf - Legolas! - makes a strangled sound. He reaches out with one hand to touch Grilka's face, and somehow it doesn't seem strange at all.

“I _know_ you,” Legolas says.

“Only took you seventy years,” Grilka responds gruffly. He can barely say it, though, through the sudden tears that make his voice shake. And as their baffled fellows watch the elf gives a sparkling laughs, and hugs him, and reaches down to kiss his face.

* * *

 

“I am not the same,” says Grilka, who was once Gimli, and now can never be again. “I am sorry, dear friend.”

The sit side-by-side on Legolas' small balcony, watching what Aglarond has become. “Yes,” says Legolas. “But you _are_ Gimli; I should have known that you spoke true, my dearest friend, and would find a way back even in death.”

“Couldn't leave you to mope, could I?” Grilka says. “And I will be back again, after this life, if you yet refuse to go to the sea.”

Legolas faces him with eyes that cannot recall despair. “This shore is enough,” he says. “ - And the company is much sweeter.”

 


End file.
